THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

Carney: Hedge Funds Are Manuevering to Loot Fannie and Freddie from the U.S Taxpayer

Wall Street billionaires are pushing a new plan to swipe the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from U.S. taxpayers–and in the process revive the system of privatized-profits and public-risk that contributed to the severity of the Great Financial Crisis.

Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity group, and the hedge fund Paulson & Co, run by Trump Wall Street supporter John Paulson, last year reportedly hired the investment bank Moelis & Co. to develop proposals to overhaul the two agencies. Blackstone is headed by Stephen Schwarzman, an adviser to President Donald Trump who reportedly has pushed the president to soften his stance on China. The plan went nowhere, in large part because it was dead on arrival in the House Financial Services committee, then run by conservative Republican stalwart and Fannie-Freddie critic Jeb Hensarling.

Hensarling, however, chose not to run for re-election and the chair of the committee will now be occupied by leftwing Democrat Maxine Waters of California. One of the tactics employed by those sympathetic to the Moelis plan has been to claim, without evidence, that government control of Fannie and Freddie somehow benefits the big banks. Wells Fargo, the California based megabank and a frequent target of Waters’ criticism, is often singled out, despite the fact that the bank has played little to no role in the long-running debate over what do to with Fannie and Freddie.

The divided Congress is also seen as an opening for the Trump administration to take action on its own, since it appears unlikely serious housing reform legislation will pass the Democratic House and the Republican Senate. The Trump administration is expected to at least implicitly reveal its plans for Fannie and Freddie when it nominates a successor to current FHFA Director Mel Watt sometime in the next few weeks.

In early November, Moelis once again put forth its plan with some minor changes. The hope is that the change in power dynamics on Capitol Hill may create an opening for the hedge funds to seize control of Fannie and Freddie by ending their conservatorships and obligations to pay dividends to the U.S. Treasury. This would deliver a huge windfall to hedge funds that snapped up junior preferred stock and common stock of the companies that remained outstanding even after they collapsed and needed to be rescued with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds.

Lobbyists and political operators have been pushing the plan on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration. It has garnered support among some Treasury Department officials, including very high-ranking advisers to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Most of the officials who have taken a favorable view of the Moelis plan have close ties to Wall Street firms themselves.

Even before he took office, Mnuchin sent the share prices of the two companies soaring when his comments following the election were seen as a promise to privatize Fannie and Freddie by releasing them from government control. He later walked back those comments, making it clear that he was offering no such promise. This year, Mnuchin said that he expects Congress to enact housing finance reform in 2019 and that the administration could take action on its own if Congress does not act. Some inside the Trump administration fear that could wind up as a push to adopt the Moelis plan.

Mick Mulvaney, the White House’s budget director and the acting head of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, is also viewed as a potential ally of those pushing the Moelis plan. As a Congressman, Mulvaney sponsored a bill that offered “a bonanza for hedge funds seeking to cash in on their investments in Fannie Mae Mae and Freddie Mac—but the cost to taxpayers would [have been] steep.” That bill died on Capitol Hill for lack of support.

When Fannie and Freddie needed to be bailed out in 2008, the U.S. Treasury agreed to fund them in exchange for senior preferred stock and warrants to buy just short of 80 percent of the common stock. Originally, the senior preferred stock paid a 10 percent dividend and the companies agreed to pay a commitment fee on the undrawn backstop. But the companies struggled to pay this dividend for years and were forced to draw down on the Treasury’s backstop, diminishing the amount available to them should they run into financial trouble again.

Eventually, the two companies took a combined $187 billion from the government and Treasury promised to supply up to a total of $400 billion. Both the original bailout and the ongoing backstop remain outstanding.

In 2012, Treasury struck an agreement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has been the conservator for the companies since 2008, to change the dividend from a fixed to a floating rate and cancel the dividend. Under this arrange, they pay a dividend equal to their positive net worth minus a small capital cushion. In quarters when the companies do badly, they pay no dividend at all. When profits roll in, the companies can pay more than the original 10 percent. And, of course, when they find themselves with a negative net worth, they can still draw on the backstop.

Government support for Fannie and Freddie went way beyond these equity investments. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have made huge purchases of the debt securities of the two companies. Treasury purchased $220 billion of Fannie and Freddie’s debt and the Fed purchased $172 billion. Through its quantitative easing program, the Fed has purchased a whopping $3.2 trillion of Fannie and Freddie backed securities, making the central bank by far the biggest customer of their mortgage bonds. These purchases are unique–the Fed and Treasury do not purchase the debt of any other private companies–and undermine the notion that these are essentially private companies under government control.

In the ten years since it became a ward of the state, Fannie Mae has taken in $119.8 billion of bailout funds, including $3.7 billion in 2017. It has paid $171.8 billion in dividends to Treasury, an average of $17.8 billion per year. But this average conceals the fact that the dividends are now far lower than they were in the early years of the post-crisis recovery. Over the last four-quarters, Fannie has paid around $5.5 billion–less than half of what it would have owed under the original 10 percent dividend.

The numbers for Freddie Mac, Fannie’s smaller sibling, tell a similar story: $71.6 billion in draws from the Treasury and around $114 billion in dividends paid. In the last four quarters, however, Freddie has paid just $3.8 billion. Like Fannie, that is less than half of what would have been due under the original 10 percent dividend.

Because these are dividends on an equity investment, the payments do not reduce the balance of bailout funds outstanding–just as dividends ordinary companies pay on their stock do not reduce the amount of their outstanding stock.

The new arrangement was challenged by hedge funds and other investors in the junior preferred and common stock, who argued that it treated them unfairly because they were cut off from the profits of the company. The government pointed out that the arrangement was authorized by a 2008 law. What’s more, the companies had only survived because of the hundreds of billions of bailout dollars supplied by the Treasury. As the only risk-taking suppliers of capital to the firms since the collapse, the taxpayers had a right to the upside, the government argued.

Federal courts at the district court and appeals court level have all agreed that the so-called net worth sweep is lawful. Although new cases continue to be filed and investors still are fighting in some courts, it increasingly appears as if their hoped-for legal channel to a windfall has been foreclosed.

Having failed in court, the hedge funds and other investors are turning to the political branches in hopes of achieving their windfall. Many proposals have emerged to reform housing finance over the years, some better than others but none securing enough support on Capitol Hill to become law.

The Moelis plan stands out as a strikingly bold grab for control of the companies and their profits. It calls for the dividend payments to the Treasury to cease so that the companies can rebuild capital. Shockingly, it also calls for the cancellation of the senior preferred stock altogether–with no compensation for the past risk and future profits currently due to taxpayers. It is as if a company proposed to do a stock buyback by proposing to cancel its shares rather than purchasing them for cash.

This would be an unprecedented giveaway, more akin to government-authorized looting than a “housing finance reform” plan. Even calling it “corporate welfare” would be too generous because the beneficiaries wouldn’t be the companies, which have been prospering under the current arrangement. The beneficiaries would be the owners of the shares of the company, which would receive a massive promotion in the capital structure in exchange for nothing. This is something new–hedge fund welfare.

Taxpayers would surrender an asset–the senior preferred stock–that is expected to return hundreds of billions of dollars, reducing deficits and tax-burdens, over the next decade. And in return they would get nothing except perhaps the gratitude of billionaires. Under the Moelis plan, the government would just deem the entire bailout as fully paid-off–as if it were an ordinary mortgage loan a homeowner could prepay when he wanted to move rather than a $400 billion guarantee of two companies originally created by the U.S. government.

Hedge funds argue that the companies should be released from their obligations to pay dividends because they have paid more than their original bailout. But they should know better: when investors purchase a stock or make a loan, it is not in the hope of getting paid back what was invested. It’s in the hope of making a decent financial return. Why shouldn’t taxpayers earn the profits made possible by their investment? None of the junior preferreds or common shares represent new capital injected into the companies since they entered conservatorship. It’s one-hundred percent taxpayer capital backing them. What’s more, the internal rate of return on the funds invested by the taxpayers has been quite small considering the amount of time that has passed.

This argument that has been rejected by federal judges as well as the Trump Justice Department. It would mark a dramatic change in direction if the Trump administration were to embrace it now.

In any case, the senior preferred stock remains a valuable and outstanding asset that legally belongs to the U.S. Treasury. Giving it away for nothing should be a nonstarter for President Donald Trump, who touted his ability to get the American people better deals.

Millions of children go hungry as the super- rich gorge themselves
and ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE!

"The top 10 percent of Americans now own roughly
three-quarters of all household wealth."

"While
telling workers there is “not enough money” for wage increases, or to fund
social programs, both parties hailed the recent construction of the U.S.S.
Gerald Ford, a massive aircraft carrier that cost $13 billion to build,
stuffing the pockets of numerous contractors and war profiteers."

Progressives’ enthusiastic support for mass immigration has converted them into “useful idiots” for the nation’s business elites, says a left-wing writer.

Today’s well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy. Even solidly leftist politicians, like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, are accused of “nativism” by critics if they recognize the legitimacy of borders or migration restriction at any point. This open borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against workers.

Nagle also argues that mass immigration operates extracts human talent from developing societies for the benefit of wealthy, comfortable U.S. elites:

Advocates of open borders often overlook the costs of mass migration for developing countries. Indeed, globalization often creates a vicious cycle: liberalized trade policies destroy a region’s economy, which in turn leads to mass emigration from that area, further eroding the potential of the origin country while depressing wages for the lowest paid workers in the destination country. One of the major causes of labor migration from Mexico to the United States has been the economic and social devastation caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). Nafta forced Mexican farmers to compete with U.S. agriculture, with disastrous consequences for Mexico. Mexican imports doubled, and Mexico lost thousands of pig farms and corn growers to U.S. competition. When coffee prices fell below the cost of production, nafta prohibited state intervention to keep growers afloat. Additionally, U.S. companies were allowed to buy infrastructure in Mexico, including, for example, the country’s main north-south rail line. The railroad then discontinued passenger service, resulting in the decimation of the rail workforce after a wildcat strike was crushed. By 2002, Mexican wages had dropped by 22 percent, even though worker productivity increased by 45 percent.7 In regions like Oaxaca, emigration devastated local economies and communities, as men emigrated to work in America’s farm labor force and slaughterhouses, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly.

Left-wing servants of business elites spray claims of racism on the public to suppress their rational and reasonable opposition to immigration exploitation, Nagle argues:

The immigration expansionists have two key weapons. One is the big business and financial interests all working on their side, but an equally powerful weapon—wielded more expertly by the left-leaning immigration expansionists—is moral blackmail and public shame. People are right to see the mistreatment of migrants as morally wrong. Many people are concerned about the growth of racism and callousness toward minorities that often accompanies anti-immigration sentiment. But the open borders position does not even live up to its own professed moral code.

The tacit alliance of the wealthy against the middle prompt some invective by the Irish author;

In the wealthiest nations, open borders advocacy seems to function as a fanatical cult among true believers—a product of big business and free market lobbying is carried along by a larger group of the urban creative, tech, media, and knowledge economy class, who are serving their own objective class interests by keeping their transient lifestyles cheap and their careers intact as they parrot the institutional ideology of their industries. The truth is that mass migration is a tragedy, and upper-middle-class moralizing about it is a farce. Perhaps the ultra-wealthy can afford to live in the borderless world they aggressively advocate for, but most people need—and want—a coherent, sovereign political body to defend their rights as citizens.

The establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees.

The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.

Two Americas: De Blasio's
Amazon vs. Trump's Walmart

That the Democrat Party is
now the party of the rich is increasingly seen in its candidates. Forget the
occasional Ocasio-Cortez. A Democrat candidate is more likely to be someone
like Illinois’ new governor, J.B. Pritzer, who promises to complete Illinois’
financial collapse with single-payer insurance and a progressive income tax,
promising to persist until he runs out of other people’s money:

Democrat Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America

On
November 6, it seemed the Republicans might hold their majority in the Senate
and in the House. Sadly, they lost their majority in the House. The
mystery is why so many Democrat candidates who are so obviously ethically
challenged won in races that should not have even been close.

How and why do Democrats continue to vote for unqualified,
dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a proven liar, a cheat who
claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job at
Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was her
plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without
Congressional interference. In short, she is a hard-left socialist who
means to control how Americans earn, spend and borrow money, how they use their
savings. Warren is a blight on the Constitution and the guaranteed
freedoms of US citizens. She is an advance operative for the socialist America
the left envisions.

Andrew
Gillum, the left's choice to be Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of
Tallahassee. He remains
under FBI investigation for corruption. Given the
information about that investigation that has been released, he appears yet
another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the Hillary Clinton
mold. The stability of Tallahassee declined catastrophically under
his leadership; crime
and murder rose drastically.

Gillum
sold out his city for money, and cries racism when confronted with his
crimes. He should never have been the candidate for the Governor of
Florida but the left cares only about race and power, not ethics or
honor. For progressives, race trumps everything else, even
character. If Gillum wins after the cheating Broward County is
infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that are inevitable
under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even
close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance
of traditional values in order to win? Yes.

Then there is Robert Menendez, the credibly accused pedophile
senator of New Jersey. He should be in prison but was saved by one
juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied after his win on November
6. Who votes for a man like this? There
is plenty of proof that he took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous
favors, trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls
being one of them. But New Jersey just re-elected this
man. They too have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.

Stacey
Abrams, the still grasping gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a
hard-left, anti-capitalist, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She
owes about $200K in credit card debt and wants to run Georgia? She
too is corrupt and incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win.
Are Georgians ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for
her anyway. Again, skin color trumps everything.

The
left ignores fine men like John James, who ran for
the House in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow. The
left ignored Eddie Edwards who ran in
New Hampshire. Both men are conservative African Americans. The
American left today pretends such candidates do not exist. They have
ignored fine people like James and Edwards as they have always ignored
brilliant men like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Jason Riley,
and Larry Elder. They revile the brilliant Clarence
Thomas. They don't like to be reminded of men like Frederick
Douglass or Booker T.
Washington. Neither of them, like Sowell, Steele,
Williams and Elder ever promoted the idea that African Americans were or would
be perennial victims. Each of them advocated for quite the opposite,
for self-reliance and independence.

This
notion of personal responsibility is anathema to today's left; they need and
promote subservience and dependency among their flock of reliable but
uninformed voters. This is why they encourage the immigration of so
many millions of illegal migrants. They assume they will be able to win for
them the right to vote. Judging by the number of them who likely
voted in the midterms, their plan is succeeding.

This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are extravagantly
wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed
to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime
or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us.

Then
there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything
candidate who won her district by 80%! This young woman
knows nothing about how any government works, let alone ours. She is
hopelessly uniformed; she knows even less about US history or the
Constitution. She is clueless about the economy. When
asked how she would pay for all the give-away programs she touts, she replied
that that was a "puzzling question"! "You
just pay for it" she answers. She has no
idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be
"inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more
than she does about US history. And yet she is already
thinking about running for President! This is a wholesale indictment
of our politicized, dumbed-down system of education. Many of her
constituents are immigrants; we are obviously not educating them at
all. They voted for all the free stuff -- college, medical care,
basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has promised to
deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream
about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to
rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.

In
addition to ODasio-Cortez, Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema,
who very likely cheated to
take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda
Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone; she only
cares about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but is also
considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with Bill
Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically
inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously
false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every
other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations
were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected
her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting
for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She
is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of
the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political
operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means necessary. They
are a clear and present danger to American as founded.

Young
people are no longer taught the truth of American history. They are
not taught the truth of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism
is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They
embrace Linda
Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without
shame. Young people don't know that communism killed over a
hundred million people in the twentieth century. Their
calculated-by-leftists ignorance is destroying our country. They try
to sell the idea that gender is not a factor of biology! They
attempt to convince young people that climate change is man-made (a travesty)
and that global warming causes wild fires (a lie). Having control
over academia, they have willfully brainwashed students for nearly two
generations. Unless your children are a strong-willed, independent
thinkers, do not send them to college!

How
and why the American left has devolved into the kind of party one finds in a
banana republic is a mystery. That our media is so anxious to
promote their corrupt candidates and the low-brow
tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it because they
can no longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a socialist state,
mandated equality of outcome? Perhaps. They will never
sell socialism to enough sentient Americans to win. They need
millions of uninformed voters to succeed.

We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of
us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need
to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty
picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest
nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have
nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this
country.

ONLY THE OBOMBS AND CRIME DUAL OF HILLARY AND BILLARY HAVE SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS THAN MAD MAXINE

"So will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial
protector of our 401k plans and save America from the next financial bubble?
Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and shakedowns. But don't
count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses. If history is any
guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from the people she is now
in charge of regulating."

Maxine Waters Unfit to Chair House Financial Services Committee

Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance.

With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing.

Throughout her storied political career, Waters

has been embroiled in numerous

controversies, including abusing her power to

enrich family members, getting a communist

dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black

Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal

Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing

the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of

selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.

A few months ago, the 80-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles encouraged violence against Trump administration cabinet members. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a summer rally in Los Angeles. Judicial Watch filed a House ethics complaint against Waters for encouraging violence against Trump Cabinet members.

Among her most corrupt acts as a federal legislator is steering millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited. Waters allocated $12 million to the Massachusetts bank in which she and her board member husband held shares. OneUnited subsequently got shut down by the government and American taxpayers got stiffed for the millions.

Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.

The reality is that without intervention by Waters OneUnited was an extremely unlikely candidate for a government bailout through the disastrous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department warned that it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending and OneUnited clearly didn’t meet that criteria.

Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch detail the deplorable financial condition of OneUnited at the time of the government cash infusion. The records also show that, prior to the bailout, the bank received a “less than satisfactory rating.” Incredibly, after that scandal Waters was chosen by her colleagues to hold a ranking position on the House Financial Services Committee she will soon chair. The only consequence for blowing $12 million on her husband’s failing bank was a slap on the hand to Waters’ chief of staff (her grandson) for violating House standards of conduct to help OneUnited.

Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.

The congresswoman was also embroiled in a fundraising scandal for skirting federal election rules with a shady gimmick that allows unlimited donations from certain contributors. Instead of raising most of her campaign funds from individuals or political action committees, Waters sells her endorsement to other politicians and political causes for as much as $45,000 a pop.

It wouldn’t be right to part without also noting some of Waters’ international accolades. She has made worldwide headlines for her frequent trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who appears on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur.

Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted by a jury of the 1979 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. With the help of fellow cult members, she escaped from jail and fled to Cuba. Outraged U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, likening the cop-assassin to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

In fact, Waters wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to assure him that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.

In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south-central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots the congresswoman repeatedly excused the violent behavior that ironically destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole from stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread, and shoes.

Should this ethically and morally challenged individual, who has repeatedly displayed behavior unbecoming of a federal lawmaker, be at the helm of an influential congressional committee that oversees the financial sector?

MAXINE WATERS USES NAZIS TACTICS TO HARASS TRUMP…. But where was her big mouth when Obama and the Clinton were sucking in bribes and looting the poor of Haiti, or operating a fraudulent slush fund charity????

"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com

Rep. Maxine Waters is fine with Farrakhan. And the left is fine with Waters. Eric Holder recently posed with Farrakhan. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG

DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION

"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

Democrat Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America

On November 6, it seemed the Republicans might hold their majority in the Senate and in the House. Sadly, they lost their majority in the House. The mystery is why so many Democrat candidates who are so obviously ethically challenged won in races that should not have even been close.

How and why do Democrats continue to vote for unqualified, dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a proven liar, a cheat who claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job at Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was her plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without Congressional interference. In short, she is a hard-left socialist who means to control how Americans earn, spend and borrow money, how they use their savings. Warren is a blight on the Constitution and the guaranteed freedoms of US citizens. She is an advance operative for the socialist America the left envisions.

Andrew Gillum, the left's choice to be Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of Tallahassee. He remains under FBI investigation for corruption. Given the information about that investigation that has been released, he appears yet another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the Hillary Clinton mold. The stability of Tallahassee declined catastrophically under his leadership; crime and murder rose drastically.

Gillum sold out his city for money, and cries racism when confronted with his crimes. He should never have been the candidate for the Governor of Florida but the left cares only about race and power, not ethics or honor. For progressives, race trumps everything else, even character. If Gillum wins after the cheating Broward County is infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that are inevitable under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance of traditional values in order to win? Yes.

Then there is Robert Menendez, the credibly accused pedophile senator of New Jersey. He should be in prison but was saved by one juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied after his win on November 6. Who votes for a man like this? There is plenty of proof that he took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous favors, trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls being one of them. But New Jersey just re-elected this man. They too have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.

Stacey Abrams, the still grasping gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a hard-left, anti-capitalist, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She owes about $200K in credit card debt and wants to run Georgia? She too is corrupt and incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win. Are Georgians ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for her anyway. Again, skin color trumps everything.

The left ignores fine men like John James, who ran for the House in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow. The left ignored Eddie Edwards who ran in New Hampshire. Both men are conservative African Americans. The American left today pretends such candidates do not exist. They have ignored fine people like James and Edwards as they have always ignored brilliant men like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, and Larry Elder. They revile the brilliant Clarence Thomas. They don't like to be reminded of men like Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington. Neither of them, like Sowell, Steele, Williams and Elder ever promoted the idea that African Americans were or would be perennial victims. Each of them advocated for quite the opposite, for self-reliance and independence.

This notion of personal responsibility is anathema to today's left; they need and promote subservience and dependency among their flock of reliable but uninformed voters. This is why they encourage the immigration of so many millions of illegal migrants. They assume they will be able to win for them the right to vote. Judging by the number of them who likely voted in the midterms, their plan is succeeding.

This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us.

Then there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything candidate who won her district by 80%! This young woman knows nothing about how any government works, let alone ours. She is hopelessly uniformed; she knows even less about US history or the Constitution. She is clueless about the economy. When asked how she would pay for all the give-away programs she touts, she replied that that was a "puzzling question"! "You just pay for it" she answers. She has no idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be "inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more than she does about US history. And yet she is already thinking about running for President! This is a wholesale indictment of our politicized, dumbed-down system of education. Many of her constituents are immigrants; we are obviously not educating them at all. They voted for all the free stuff -- college, medical care, basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has promised to deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.

In addition to ODasio-Cortez, Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema, who very likely cheated to take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone; she only cares about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but is also considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means necessary. They are a clear and present danger to American as founded.

Young people are no longer taught the truth of American history. They are not taught the truth of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They embrace Linda Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without shame. Young people don't know that communism killed over a hundred million people in the twentieth century. Their calculated-by-leftists ignorance is destroying our country. They try to sell the idea that gender is not a factor of biology! They attempt to convince young people that climate change is man-made (a travesty) and that global warming causes wild fires (a lie). Having control over academia, they have willfully brainwashed students for nearly two generations. Unless your children are a strong-willed, independent thinkers, do not send them to college!

How and why the American left has devolved into the kind of party one finds in a banana republic is a mystery. That our media is so anxious to promote their corrupt candidates and the low-brow tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it because they can no longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a socialist state, mandated equality of outcome? Perhaps. They will never sell socialism to enough sentient Americans to win. They need millions of uninformed voters to succeed.

We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this country.

BARACK OBAMA, LA RAZA FASCISM and the CULTURE of DEM CORRUPTION

They Destroyed Our Country

“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”

CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually shrank.

Meanwhile, Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”

“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”

Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”

The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?

There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.

But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”

The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:

Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.

The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

Fannie Mae and 'Freddie Maxine'

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the House's powerful Financial Services Committee. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, "We are going to do to them what they did to us." I'm not going to cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.

But here we go again asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

Back during he the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts were the co-sponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to "roll the dice" on the housing market. That worked out well.

Meanwhile, Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least being dishonorably discharged from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.

Enter Maxine Waters. Back in 2009, I had a run-in with "Mad Maxine," as she is called on Capitol Hill. The two of us appeared together on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," and when she pontificated about the misdeeds of the housing lobby, I confronted her on the money she took from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac PACs for her campaign.

Here is how the conversation went:

MAHER: Don't you think Wall Street needs regulation? That's where the problem is: that there was no regulation.

MOORE: Well, let's talk about regulation. One of the biggest institutions that have failed this year was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an institution that your friends, the Democrats, in fact, you, Congresswoman Waters, did not want to regulate. You said it wasn't broke five years ago at a congressional hearing, and you took $15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.

WATERS: That is a lie, and I challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC.

I have to confess that Waters is very persuasive. I feared when the show was over that I had gotten my numbers wrong and that I had falsely charged the congresswoman of corruption. But several fact-checking groups looked it up, and sure enough, I was right. She took $15,000 from the PAC and another $17,000, all told.

I was also right about her statements during a 2004 congressional hearing when she said:

"Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something (Fannie and Freddie) that wasn't broke. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines."

We learned the hard way just four years later; this was all a fraudulent claim to avoid oversight of her campaign contributors. Imagine if a Republican had said these things.

She took in more than $100,000 from Wall Street this year as well. None of this is illegal, but it calls into question her shakedown tactics. First, she threatens to put their head in a noose as chairman of the Financial Services Committee — as she is getting them to pony up campaign contributions. Pay to play? You decide.

Waters has had run-ins with the House Ethics Committee because of fundraising tactics and insider wheeling and dealing. Back during the financial crisis, she was suspected of helping arrange meetings with Treasury Department officials and getting bailout money for OneUnited, a troubled bank that her family owned major stock holdings in. She beat the rap of corruption, but it sure smelled bad.

So will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and save America from the next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses. If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from the people she is now in charge of regulating.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy."